Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf has rejected a Congressional map proposal submitted to him Friday by the state's top Republican legislative leaders. Wolf said by his team's analysis, the GOP proposal does not meet his standards for fairness. "The analysis by my team shows that, like the 2011 map, the map submitted to my office by Republican leaders is still a gerrymander," the governor said in a statement. "Their map clearly seeks to benefit one political party, which is the essence of why the court found the current map to be unconstitutional."

Next week, the Supreme Court will hear oral argument in Gill v. Whitford, a case challenging Wisconsin's legislative district lines as an unconstitutional Republican gerrymander. It's attracted attention because many high-minded commentators have blamed partisan gerrymandering for today's highly polarized politics -- and for the fact that Republicans have won majorities in 67 of the 98 houses of state legislatures and in 10 of the past 12 elections in the U.S. House of Representatives. But as I and others have argued, gerrymandering has contributed only marginally to Republican success. More important is demographic clustering. Democratic voters are heavily clustered in...

What do you think is the most important issue in American politics today? Criminal justice reform? Health care? Global climate change? Immigration? Gay rights? Economic justice? ISIS? Creeping totalitarianism? All of those things (and more!) are incredibly important, but they may all be secondary to something else: gerrymandering. And earlier this week, the Supreme Court announced that it was going to decide a case that could potentially reform the practice entirely. For those not familiar with the term, gerrymandering is the process by which state legislators draw voting district boundaries, for both congressional and state legislature districts. That sounds pretty...

Eric Holder, former President Barack Obama’s attorney general, confirmed Wednesday that he’s considering throwing his hat in the ring for the 2020 presidential race. “We’ll see,” he said during a breakfast sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor in Washington, DC. He was asked if he’s mulling a run for the White House because he’s learning how to raise funds and giving political speeches. “I think I’ll make a decision by the end of the year about whether or not there is another chapter in my government service,” he replied. Holder, who served as attorney general from 2009 to 2015, has...

Following a Democrat’s special election win in a Wisconsin Senate district that voted for President Donald Trump, a group backed by former President Barack Obama said it plans to invest millions of dollars into state-wide elections in Wisconsin and 10 other states. The National Democratic Redistricting Committee, led by former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, said this year’s election cycle is critical to affecting the congressional redistricting process. It is the first cycle whose winners will participate in drawing congressional maps for the decade starting in 2021. The committee backed Democrat Patty Schachtner in last month’s election in the 10th...

Even as Democrats publicly and loudly decry corporatist political “dark money,” billionaire Democrats and other donors funnel hundreds of millions to radical and violent causes. Barely a week had passed after Donald Trump’s historic upset in the November 8 presidential election, but some of the world’s richest individuals were already launching a counteroffensive. George Soros and his fellow deep-pocket funders of the Democratic Party and left-wing causes gathered with a lineup of party activists and luminaries from Hollywood, K Street, and Wall Street for a three-day “investment conference” (November 15-17) at the luxurious Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Washington, D.C....

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - An ideologically divided U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday handed a win to Republicans in Texas by putting on hold rulings that said electoral districts drawn by state lawmakers discriminated against minority voters. On a 5-4 vote, with the court’s conservatives in the majority and the liberal justices dissenting, the court in a brief order blocked two different lower court decisions that found fault with both congressional districts and state legislative districts drawn by the Republican-controlled state legislature. In August, a federal court in Texas struck down two Republican-drawn congressional districts saying they were discriminatory and ordering new...

Liberals are trying to mess with Texas. And they don't plan on stopping there. Still reeling from nearly a decade of devastating losses in statehouses across the nation as well as in the 2016 presidential election, Democrats in Washington, D.C. are plotting to pour hundreds of millions of dollars in state and local elections across the country. With the help of hedge fund billionaire George Soros, the National Democratic Redistricting Committee hopes to wrest control from voters of congressional re-districting in 2021 when booming conservative states such as Texas will gain seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. All for...

Obama Advisor Susan Rice’s Unmasking Material is at the Obama Library Judicial Watch Sues for Obama Family Travel and Secret Service Costs President Trump: Please End the Obstruction on Benghazi Cover-up Documents Supreme Court to Hear Big Case Against Proposed Wisconsin Redistricting Obama Advisor Susan Rice’s Unmasking Material is at the Obama Library Your Judicial Watch performed a massive public service this week. We exposed how key Obama spying scandal documents, including the infamous Susan Rice unmasking records, were moved to the Obama Presidential Library. The National Security Council (NSC) informed us by letter on May 23, 2017, that...

You don’t see a Kagan-Breyer-Ginsburg-Sotomayor-Thomas majority often in U.S. Supreme Court decisions, but today that quintet joined together to deal a blow to North Carolina Republicans. In the decision in Cooper v. Harris, the eight-member pre-Gorsuch roster upheld a district court’s ruling that two congressional districts in North Carolina were unconstitutional racial gerrymanders, putting an end to one part of a six-year saga that began with redistricting in 2011.

Former president working with Eric Holder to focus on redistricting efforts A group backed by former President Barack Obama participated at a D.C. gathering of deep-pocketed progressive donors strategizing to "restore progressive government" and to ensure fair redistricting in upcoming years. The gathering, hosted by the dark money Democracy Alliance network, is part of the network's spring investment conference and national donor summit held in D.C to plot resistance against President Trump and Republicans. The summit consists of numerous panels and discussions with key Democratic groups and players. Kelly Ward, the executive director of the Obama-linked National Democratic Redistricting Committee...

A panel of federal judges has ordered the Wisconsin Legislature to redraw legislative boundaries by November, rejecting calls from those challenging the maps to have the judges do the work. The three-judge panel released its decision in the redistricting case Friday. The state is expected to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to take the case. State attorneys had asked for the Republican-controlled Legislature to be allowed to draw the maps if the Supreme Court orders them redone. Democrats who sued over the boundaries wanted the judges to do that. …

After two election cycles as the executive director of the House Democrats’ campaign arm, Kelly Ward has a new challenge: helping to lead a coordinated Democratic redistricting effort ahead of new map drawings following the 2020 census. Ward will be the interim executive director of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, a group led by President Barack Obama and former Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. A native of Las Vegas, Ward largely earned her chops in Arizona politics before emerging as a top campaign aide on the national stage, becoming the first person to spend two consecutive elections as the...

The highest court in Massachusetts is set to hear arguments in a long-running legal battle over whether former House speaker Thomas Finneran should be able to collect his $34,000 annual pension despite his conviction on an obstruction of justice charge. Finneran’s fall from grace began in 2003 when he lied about his role in a legislative redistricting plan. …

A unanimous Supreme Court ruled Monday that illegal immigrants and other non-citizens can be counted when states draw their legislative districts, shooting down a challenge by Texas residents who said their own voting power was being diluted. The ruling does not grant non-citizens power to vote, but says the principle of “one person, one vote” doesn’t require localities to only count those who are actually eligible to vote. Justice Ruth Baden Ginsburg, writing for the court, said even though only eligible voters are supposed to cast ballots, elected officials represent all people within their districts, and it is that act...

Earlier today, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the Virginia redistricting case on appeal from a lower court decision to completely redraw the map in the middle of an election. Once again, the most important political questions of our time are all decided by the unelected branch of government – the one that was to have “neither force nor will.” The practice of gerrymandering, drawing congressional district boundaries to benefit those in power, is as old as it is unfair. After all, this odious practice was named after one of its earliest practitioners, Elbridge Gerry, one of the top...

WASHINGTON -- A separate redistricting case heard by the U.S. Supreme Court Tuesday has a Hispanic congressmen worried it could lead to giving the majority Anglo population a new tool to maintain political control despite changing demographics. The case challenges the practice in Texas to use census population to divide up the state into different legislative districts. That system, the same as used in Arizona, is based on a head count done every decade by the U.S. Census. But challengers contend that's not fair, as population does not equate with ability to vote. So they are asking the justices to...

Doesn't anyone else think it's time the public found out who funded the coalition of groups suing the Legislature over its redistricting maps? Who paid plaintiff attorney David King?God knows, it wasn't the League of Women Voters of Florida. So, how does a group with such a tiny budget wrangle a team of high-priced, Gucci-shoed lawyers, arguing every one of the redistricting lawsuits in court?

HILLARY CLINTON played the race card in Alabama last week, telling Democrats that plans to close 31 underused satellite offices of the state's Department of Motor Vehicles are evidence of Republican racism. The closings were compelled by spending cuts enacted by a GOP-majority legislature facing a budget crisis, but Clinton slammed it as "a blast from the Jim Crow past," since most of the branch offices are in predominantly black rural towns and Alabamans have to show photo identification when they vote. "Fifty years after Rosa Parks sat and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. marched and John Lewis bled," Clinton...